Archive for June, 2017

You’ve packed the wellies and the wet wipes – but which titles should accompany them in your rucksack?

Let’s not tempt fate, but at the time of writing, this year’s Glastonbury looks set to be a relatively sun-soaked experience, very different from the mixture of Brexit misery and mud that characterised last year’s festival. With any luck, these words will be read by people spending long, languid hours sitting on the grass, staring into blue skies – and, from time to time, reaching for a book.

But what to read? Start, maybe, with one of the best music-based texts of the last two years: Playing The Bass With Three Left Hands by Will Carruthers (Faber). A beautifully written memoir of the time when the author was a member of the neo-psychedelic bands Spacemen 3 and Spiritualized, it portrays musty-smelling bohemia in the thrillingly unlikely environs of Rugby, the privations of being a musician while constantly skint, and summer weekends playing fifth on the bill at British festivals. The title comes from Carruthers’s recollection of taking LSD before a performance in Leeds, where he hallucinated that he had grown two extra limbs. “This made perfect sense to me at the time,” he writes, “Three hands are better than none, right?” Then comes the kicker: “I got paid 15 quid for that show.”

The mood is rightly jubilant for Labour, but the insurgent party can’t forget the complexity of its position

We will remember this summer for the rest of our lives. It is starting to feel like a whole decade compacted into mere weeks: despair followed by joy followed by yet more despair, while political certainties that recently seemed rock solid suddenly fall away.

After 10 years of pain, austerity might just be in retreat. The idea of England and Wales as some monochrome expanse, full of nostalgia and nastiness and people content to watch as their social fabric is serially wrecked, has been drastically weakened. The horrors at Grenfell Tower are obviously part of the same moment: a hesitant national awakening in which a sense of dread and worry about where we are headed has been intensified by a sudden realisation about the country we have become.

The centre of Birmingham at midnight offered plenty of proof of what had just happened. On Broad Street, the neon-lit strip that sits at the heart of the city’s nightlife, an endless parade of young people were shouting their joy. “Corbyn! Corbyn!” yelped three twentysomething men; a woman told me she planned to drink a shot of tequila every time Labour gained a seat. They talked in emotional terms about student debt, the health service, and their belief in a diverse Britain. But perhaps the most moving part was played by a man in a wheelchair, who told us he was penniless and bemoaned the cruelties of the benefits system before he mentioned Jeremy Corbyn, and uttered seven words that made me well up: “Something has to change in this world.”

Over 12 electrifying hours, John Harris and John Domokos pinball around the bellwether West Midlands – from Brexit heartlands where older voters took against Jeremy Corbyn, to the diverse, urban areas where young people backed the Labour leader to the hilt and pushed Theresa May’s vision of the country’s future aside. Seats are won and lost, but one thing is clear: hope has suddenly returned

Five weeks after their election trek began, John Harris and John Domokos travel through England and Wales and watch Jeremy Corbyn in action, as they try to answer the crucial questions: is the Labour surge real? Has Theresa May’s campaign crumpled? And where is the country heading next?